The new age of finance-capital – ft. Costas Lapavitsas & Stephen Maher

We had the pleasure of hosting a rich and timely conversation with two of the most insightful analysts of contemporary capitalism: Costas Lapavitsas, professor at SOAS and author of Profiting Without Producing, and Stephen Maher, co-editor of The Socialist Register and co-author (with Steve Aquanno) of From JP Morgan to BlackRock: The Fall and Rise of American Finance. Together, they help us make sense of financialisation – not as some distortion of capitalism, but as a strategic transformation that allowed the system to overcome the profitability crisis of the 1970s. Instead of weakening capital, finance has become a central mechanism through which capital reorganises itself disciplining labour, reshaping global production and deepening class domination.

What is financialisation? We begin with definitions rooted in classical political economy. Despite different emphases, both Lapavitsas and Maher highlight how finance has evolved from a supporting function into a dominant force, reshaping production, consumption, and even the structure of the state. Crisis and response: finance as capital’s lifeline contrary to mainstream narratives that frame finance as a parasitic drain on a healthy “productive” capitalism, both scholars argue that financialisation emerged as a response to the crisis of profitability in the productive sector. It provided new outlets for accumulation – via credit, speculation, and asset inflation – that allowed capital to maintain dominance in the neoliberal era. Globalisation and the logic of finance financialisation didn’t just stay at home: it enabled the globalisation of production; by providing liquidity, managing risk and creating new speculative instruments, finance smoothed the outsourcing of industrial production to the global South, while keeping profits flowing to the core. The dollar-based global financial system played a key role in this restructuring. 

Marx, money & financial expropriation: one of the most stimulating parts of the discussion dives into Marx’s conception of money and speculative profits. Drawing on classic sources – from Sir James Steuart to Marx’s insights on “profits upon alienation” – we ask: in a world where central banks and private finance can create “free” liquidity, are we seeing a new form of expropriation emerge? Rather than generating surplus value through production, finance increasingly extracts wealth through asset inflation, interest, and speculative trading. Is this a secondary form of exploitation that complements -and sometimes competes with – productive exploitation? Lapavitsas and Maher offer different but complementary responses rooted in serious marxist theory.